Obviously, Linux vendors will not remain untouched by the economic downturn. Novell has already announced a number of lay offs, and the openSUSE Linux division has not been spared. openSUSE board members Pascal Blesser and Bryen Yunashko announced the lay offs.

SUSE is based off of OpenSUSE, in much the same way that Red Hat is based off of Fedora and StarOffice is based off of OpenOffice. Because of this, these companies have a vested interest in paying open source developers to work on the project since they can have a voice in the direction of the project and because it makes creating the commercial version from the open source version easier.

What this means is uncertain. If the OpenSUSE community steps up to the challenge and Novell focuses its efforts, it could mean that OpenSUSE will be more community driven, and possibly SUSE might be. If not, it could mean that Novell may be focusing its efforts on SUSE and pulling out of its support for OpenSUSE in the same way Novell pulled out of Compiz and focused on its own Nomad branch (which thankfully will finally be merged into Compiz).